Readings

by Rick Dietrich

I had hoped this time to write about Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, though it is a book, I suspect, that many of you have already read. Or, you have seen the popular movie, which I have not. But, I am finding writing about The Hours a difficult task. It is an award-winning book with rave reviews: “a lovely triumph,” according to The Boston Globe, “ “remarkable,” says the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, even more, “a brilliant tour de force,” according to The Miami Herald, “dazzling,” “luxurious,” “richly imagined” and “profoundly compassionate,” “inspired”—so say all.

I didn’t like it. At all.

Yet, I find it difficult to say why. It’s not that I’m uninspired by the prose, which often seems to me too luscious by half, or that I think the ending is altogether too neatly imagined—or is it that I think Cunningham fails Virginia Woolf, his inspiration. But, the last is a good place to start. In her essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf writes that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” This is not a philosophical or theological claim, however, but a literary one. “I believe,” Woolf goes on, “that all novels deal with character, and that it is to express character— not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.” The “Mr. Bennett” of the title is the novelist, Arnold Bennett, who, Woolf thinks, has not created his characters from the inside out but described them from the outside in for the purposes of preaching.

And I find The Hours, rightly or wrongly, a preachy book — a profoundly political book. I don’t mean that in the narrow sense, that it supports, let’s say, a Democratic Party agenda. On the other hand, it was clearly not written by a Republican. I mean “political” in the larger sense, that (at least, so it appears to me), it is really less about people and their relationships, whatever the reviewers say, than it is about power.

Granted, power is an aspect of any relationship, no matter how intimate, how balanced, or how pure, for we live in a fallen world. But Cunningham seems to me to exult selfishness, the most powerful of the powers (the power to withhold). The book is less about staying than about walking away. Of the major characters, two commit suicide and one deserts her family, husband and two young children. Only Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep, if you’re a moviegoer) is consistently faithful to her family and friends—or really even thinks about them as existing apart from herself.

Perhaps I am being selfish. This has turned out to be less a review than a provocation. And that may be because I am so provoked by suicide, about which, it seems to me, the Church has been right: it is the unforgivable sin. It is unforgivable, however, in my view, not because we cannot repent of it before God who is ever with us, but because we can’t repent of it with those we leave, repenting not only of our desertion but also of all that it poisons, an entire shared past.

We discussed The Hours in the Lay Institute’s book group, “Theology & Literature.” It is only fair to say that almost no one agreed with my take on this book. So, it is likely you’ll disagree, too, if you read it.

But, if you ask me, don’t.

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